Task Force Appointed to Explore Solutions to Save City’s Libraries

VENTURA —  Hoping to save the city’s cash-starved libraries from closure, Ventura leaders have formed a task force to search for immediate funding while exploring the possibility of pulling the city’s three libraries out of the county Library Services Agency.

“We need solutions now,” said Cherie Brant, a member of the task force, which met for the first time Thursday.

“Our libraries are going to die if we don’t do something soon,” said Brant, who served as campaign coordinator for the Save Our Libraries committee.

The task force was created by Councilman Jim Friedman and Mayor Jack Tingstrom to pull together various groups in the community that have pushed for action on the issue.

“They all have great ideas,” Friedman said. “They just haven’t been able to put them forth in the proper form.”

The city has three active library groups: the Library Advisory Board, the Ventura Friends of the Library and the Save Our Libraries committee, created last fall to support a November ballot initiative aimed at raising money for city branches.

The measure, which would have imposed a $35 parcel tax per homeowner, was supported by 53% of the electorate but failed to garner the two-thirds vote needed.

Library supporters packed City Hall on Monday night to urge council members to create a special assessment district modeled after the unsuccessful ballot initiative.

The city could raise $1.2 million for its libraries by levying a $35 property tax, supporters said.

But some council members oppose the idea.

“I would have a problem with that because . . . a mandate was not set” by voters, Friedman said.

Library supporters said Thursday that city leaders need to be open to suggestions, including the politically unpopular idea of taxes. And they stressed the need for the new task force to embrace suggestions put forward by the community.

“They should bring everything to the table,” said Keith Burns, a member of the city’s Library Advisory Board and a local bookstore owner.

Brant agreed. “I think it is positive for all these groups to be sitting down at the same table talking together, and I think we can all work together to find a solution to this,” she said. “But it is not an easy problem.”

At the task force’s meeting Thursday, Brant presented Friedman and Tingstrom with a plan her group has compiled, based on a joint-powers agreement used in Santa Clara County.

There, the county and its nine cities cooperatively provide library services. Funding is generated, in part, by property taxes, motor vehicle taxes and a special assessment district. Brant says the arrangement would be a good model for Ventura County and plans to ask county and other city leaders to consider it.

Library supporters have also suggested pulling Ventura’s three libraries out of the 16-library county system because funding has dropped so dramatically.

The annual operating budget for Ventura’s libraries has plummeted from $3 million to $1.8 million in the last three years.

County officials have warned that shutting down two of Ventura’s three branches may be the only way to preserve quality library service in the city.

In Ventura, library boosters want to see money pumped back into their libraries to restore hours and services that have been cut.

Friedman said he expects the task force will come back with recommendations by the beginning of April.

“It would be unacceptable for the city to lose the libraries as a resource,” Friedman said. “We are still a ways away, but at least something is being done.”